Battlefield: Hardline Delayed, Sets Crosshairs for 2015

The Battlefield franchise will not be putting out a game this year anymore, revealed Electronic Arts today. Battlefield: Hardline — originally slated for an October 21st release — has been pushed back into next year.

The reason for the delay is to improve the game based off player feedback from the beta in June.

"Back at E3, we launched a beta for Hardline — we wanted to not only show you the game, but to let you play it for yourselves," said Karl Magnus Troedsson, DICE VP and Group GM in a statement on the Battlefield blog. "Millions of you jumped in and had a great time. As a result, the Visceral Games team learned a lot from players about what they wanted in the game. We’ve been poring over the data and feedback, and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you.

This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn’t have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months."

This will ensure that both development parties — Visceral Games and DICE — will utilize the extra time to focus on some key areas they feel the game needs extra work: The first is to innovate the multiplayer component based on "feature ideas direct from the community that will evolve the cops and criminals fantasy into a truly unique Battlefield Multiplayer experience." The second is fleshing out the single-player story and expanding it with a "deeper crime revenge story experience." The last key area of importance is stability. The team is learning from the mistakes of Battlefield 4 and making sure Hardline does not suffer a similar fate.

We're hoping the extra development time means Battlefield can make a strong return, especially after the negativity surrounding Battlefield 4's constant multiplayer issues. The delay also ensures the game isn't drowned from all of the other AAA hits coming out around that October-November.